Initial Audio has introduced Sektor, a new polyphonic wavetable synthesizer for Mac & Windows.
Sektor features advanced modulation features, including modulation Envelopes, ADSR´s and LFO´s that can be routed to the synths parameters via drag and drop, or via the right click menu of the knobs. The modulation matrix gives you even more access to features such as velocity, aftertouch and more.
Sektor also comes with two effect racks including reverb, delay, distortion, chorus, phaser, trance gate, compressor, stereo shaper and a 4-band equalizer. The order of the effects can be rearranged via drag and drop.
Features:
- 500 presets.
- Over 200 wavetables.
- An advanced sequencer/Arpeggiator.
- GUI Skinning and colour changing within the plugin.
- 2 Effects racks containing 9 effects each.
- 2 Wavetable oscillators and a sub oscillator.
- Built in Sample player, which supports multi sample instruments. Will also load Heat Up 2 instruments.
- MPE (Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression) support for keyboards that use this new MIDI-based standard.
Pricing and Availability
Sektor is available now for US $139. A demo version is also available.
Really lovely looking synth…………..
Is there a serum vs sektor chart?
Doesn’t look like there is much you can do with the Osc’s besides move through the wavetable. Which if it’s true makes it alot less capable than some of it’s competitors. Anyways I wish soft synth designers weren’t so hung up on wavetable right now and would focus more on pure complex DSP sound generation for the Oscillators.
A relatively nicely done synth – clean vector GUI for nice scaling, OK sound, interesting unison abilities, nice visuals to show how modulators are affecting things, 2 effect racks for interesting routing. Sample oscillator might be interesting too but the video didn’t say it could track pitch so it might just be a wav player.
They couldn’t have entered a more densely packed and competitively fierce arena however. Seriously, we have had an unbelievable number of quality wavetable synths to choose from for a few years, most with features far beyond what Sektor offers. MPE is the only fresh thing I see on Sektor but that’s only important to a small percentage of users. I’ve purchased enough other wavetable VSTs that I’m finding it hard to get excited about this one. The video doesn’t really show how Sektor can take you in a new direction from every other wavetable synth out there.
No user wavetables? I hope I just missed that in the video. Pretty limited number of LFOs and envelopes for a modern synth. Some other odd choices too: The filter envelope being it’s own separate thing from the other envelopes, very limited sine-only sub oscillator, only 6 total filter types (LP/BP/HP at 12 or 24db), no 3D wavetable view (I kind of find them handy), some of the GUI isn’t really consistent, the ADSRs are just sliders with no graphics or ability to curve, no MSEGs which are always nice, and why did they include rainbow mode? Some of the terminology feels off too. Like the oscillator morph – isn’t that just wavetable index? Or that the sequencer should just be called an arp. Yeah, some of these seem small but when you’re asking close to top dollar I don’t think we should expect anything less than a close to top product. It’s a tight market and the price is close enough to Serum, Dune 2, Rapid, Massive, etc. that the comparisons are unavoidable.
I’ll still give it a whirl with the demo. It looks good enough to give it a fair shake. Maybe it’s magic is somewhere else. The whole thing feels like Serum Lite until you get to the price though.
The letter ‘K’ seems jolly popular in soft synths these days. Why not use the grammatically correct ‘C’ I wonder?
Hi Paulo! Many soft synths such as NI and Waldorf are designed in Germany and German makes use of the letter “k” instead of “c”. Now I do not know if this soft synth in particular is German… Maybe they also want to make the soft synth sound “exotic”.
Surely you meant “eksotiik” !! 😀
Good luck to the developers but………perhaps I’m missing a detail or two, I can’t see what is radically new here. Or even a bit new. That’s my version of Christmas cheer!
Isn’t this just Serum with a lot less features?
I think my new approach to these vst rendered as hardware teaser synth ads is going to be to ignore completely and wait for the hardware version.
Somebody should make hardware versions of this stuff. I am talking close to the spitting image of the software graphic renderings. That would be super sexy.
This is EPIC! 😉